The Weird Logic Of Joey Bosa Critics

First off, if you haven’t read the news from last week, please do. Long story short, I’m getting married this week and then going on honeymoon, so the next two weeks will be mostly guest comics and collaborations from folks gracious enough to help me out.

First up, a comic by the excellent Chirurgeon! (Check out his old football work here)This comic started as a twitter back and forth between the two of us last week and He was gracious enough to help bring it to life when I asked. The idea started as his, so it feels right to have his final art up there.

The idea started because both of us are pretty much baffled by the major criticisms of Joey Bosa through this whole process. Namely the people who seem to think that he should just acquiesce and allow himself to get screwed because his place of employment is a game that is fun to play. Apparently liking what you do means you should just allow the company who already has too much power over you to screw you over. Even though everyone else in the same position was treated better. I don’t know how anyone can view the Chargers as the lesser evil here. For any criticisms of Bosa you might have, The Chargers are almost cartoonish levels of pointlessly evil here. They can afford to pay Bosa. They can afford to give him not one but both of his contract demands. But they won’t, because reasons. They had all the leverage in the world and Bosa is effectively making a heroic last stand against a bully he cannot beat. Maybe Bosa would have never won so you think his holdout was dumb, but that doesn’t mean you should call him a bad word because he wants to be treated fairly, a right of all employees in any workplace. This is more than just a game. It’s his job. Stop demanding he give up all his rights because he gets to play a sport. A sport that heavily damages bodies and minds, no less. These players get paid millions, but in so many ways, they are still treated very unfairly by the billionaires that own them and treat them like property.

I think of it a lot like when people ask me to make them art for nothing, or “exposure”. Exposure is bad compensation for an artist’s talents, and people who think artists should just be happy with Exposure because the artist gets to make art for a living are extortionists. Just because I like what I do doesn’t mean I don’t deserve to get fairly compensated for it. It’s still my job. I’m convinced anyone who uses arguments like this must be stuck doing a crappy job they hate so they automatically resent anyone who gets to do something they find fun for a living because they lack the perspective on that job.

If you are a Chargers fan who thinks Bosa should have just nutted up and just take a shitty contract because reasons, maybe you should consider why you are so eager to support a team actively trying to screw over San Diego; a Team actively ruining it’s reputation to players and agents around the league by showing how cheap and difficult you are to negotiate with. I’ll leave you with Chir’s words for the final bit of this blog post.

“If you ever read about contract disputes between players and teams and find yourself siding with billionaires who routinely extort taxpayers for hundreds of millions of dollars for new stadiums that never make their money back for the communities, you should probably rethink your priorities. Whenever I interview for a new job and negotiate pay, I’m thankful that I don’t have to deal with the same public scrutiny players do for what will most likely the be the only football job they ever have.”

Discussion (33) ¬

The Kaep news is fairly recent, and comics take a little while to draw. Plus, if I had a guess for Dave’s genuine thoughts about it, it would be that he doesn’t agree with what Kaep is doing, but he has a right to protest and have his own opinion.

If America was stepping all over my race, I would probably feel a little dumb during the anthem. I’m not edgy enough to sit down about it though, I would just stand up and not care. I’m not gonna look at a player and say “Look at you, standing up with your hand over your heart while the country is shitting on us! Uncle Ton ass….”

Kaepernick posts a lot of BLM stuff on Instagram, he really knows how he feels.

Dean Spanos has proven on multiple occasions that he cares more about money and control than actually winning at football or personal loyalty. It’s his prerogative to do so, and if he’s happy with the perennial 8-8 doldrums that’s fine, but when you’re selling a product whose primary attractions are entertainment and a tribalist construct, souring relations with players and coaches, and screwing over your city and fanbase will eventually catch up to you. Ask Donald Sterling or Ted Stepien.

As far as Bosa is concerned, he was in the right the entire time. The Chargers didn’t want to give up either the offset language or the bonus deferment because they were afraid to set a precedent, but that doesn’t work for three reasons:

1. Joey Bosa is a special case, in that he is a top-5 draft pick, a class that is considered elite relative to the rest of the rookie class;
2. In the context of the negotiations, top 5 picks almost never (I believe 3 out of 25 from 2011-15) have both easing clauses in their contracts, so the precedent is already set against the Chargers; and
3. Since the rookie scale was introduced in 2011, the Chargers have picked 18, 18, 11, 25, 15, and 3. Bosa is their first top-10 draft pick since the took Eli number 1 overall in 2004, and only their fifth since 1992. It’s just not worth harming your investment and killing your PR to preserve a position that you don’t have to defend 80% of the time.

It seems like some people think fairness and equality are limited to certain pay grades and vocations. Once your salary passes a certain threshold or your job is of a certain type, they start spewing that drivel of “you should be grateful to blah blah blah blah, you should bend over and let your employer have their way with you.” It’s stupid. Just because NFL players play a sport and make millions of dollars does not mean they’re any less entitled to be treated fairly than anyone else.

I’m really sick of people resenting athletes because of their pay or because they play a game. It’s especially cringeworthy when the resentment comes from someone who enjoys watching the sport that athlete plays.

I don’t really understand why SD was digging in their heels over the timing of paying the signing bonus. They are on the hook for the entire thing, regardless of what happens, right? If Bosa gets hit by a bus the day after he signs, the Chargers still have to pay it.

So what does it benefit them to delay paying it for a few months? The 0.1% interest they can make by having it sit in the bank? Is their cash flow situation so horrible that coming up with the money is a problem? Don’t they have to escrow it anyway because it’s guaranteed?

Seems to me the offset language is much more important from the team’s point of view.

NFL ownership isn’t a profitable business. It’s just not. Let’s look at some math on it.

The Green Bay Packers are one of the 10 most profitable clubs in the NFL. We know more about them than anyone else, because they are a public entity, but we can extrapolate a LOT. We know about how much team makes in merchandise. We know about how many tickets are sold, and how much those tickets cost, and we know how much the teams are allotted from the NFL for distribution.

The Packers last year pulled in $29M, almost all of which is being reinvested into Lambeau (the total cost of upkeep and upgrades they are looking at is $55M, so almost 2 years of “profits”). Again, this is one of the ten most profitable teams in the NFL. And they are relatively low on the cost-obligations to maintain a team, in part because of the public ownership aspect, and in part because property values in Green Bay just don’t come close to the larger metro areas.

Owners cover the cost of coaches, doctors, physical therapists, lawyers, accountants, bookkeepers, equipment, utilities, and every other expense going into the NFL. Those costs are not light, and they are not just dismissable. They generally are going to cost *more* than what the owners get in their Revenue Sharing mechanism, which means the team-specific profits that come in are still required to pay just basic operating costs of the organization.

A lot of people thought that, when the owners refused to open their books, they didn’t want people to realize just how much money they are making. This is not only asininity born of the politics of envy, it’s likely the exact opposite case: they didn’t want people knowing how *LITTLE* they make.

Some owners in the NFL– the Snyders, the Joneses, the Bowlens, the Allens– are phenomenally wealthy outside of their team. They have billions of dollars that they just already have. Others just, well, don’t. Peyton Manning is worth more than Jim Irsay is, exclusive of the value of the Colts. But the value of an NFL team is *all* about the perception– it’s not an actual resource with intrinsic value. It’s a perceived value and a prestige, and that’s *it*. It takes 34 YEARS at the Packers rate to gather in $1B in profits. Let me put that in perspective– at the kind of returns those NFL owners could be making off of $1B (below the estimated values of all but like 7 NFL teams), could be doubling their money every 6-7 years or so. That means, instead of 1B in 34 years, they could be pulling $32B off of reasonably aggressive (but not risky) investment. $1B in profits from the NFL, plus increase in the team’s sale value vs. $32B.

The NFL isn’t profitable for the owners. Not in a sense that truly wealthy people consider profitable. It is about the prestige of being an NFL owner– and let’s be utterly, completely clear about this as well: that prestige is more important to the players as it is to the owners, because it is a large lever that the owners have in pulling large contracts from the networks, which is where the vast majority of the NFL’s income is derived. That cache that they bring to the table, that perception of their importance, their united strength has done more to increase the revenue of the NFL than the players talent itself, because their bargaining is what has pushed the profitability of the league.

Which brings me to San Diego. Everyone is calling Spanos a billionaire, which, technically, yes. Except, of his estimated $1.69B net wealth, $960 of that is his ownership% in the value of the Chargers. Yes, he’s still rich at $730M~ in other assets, mostly his construction company (one of the largest in the country). THOSE are profitable for him, sure. And sure, he could tap from that to keep funding more of the Chargers, but in all likelihood, he already does. He is *LOSING* money on this venture, not making it. It’s a hobby, not an investment. And it’s an *expensive* hobby.

He’s the deal: he doesn’t have the money to build the stadium. He isn’t running the Chargers to make money; he runs it the way he does to avoid losing more money. And he can’t come out and say that, because if the NFL isn’t profitable? It doesn’t have the weight everyone thinks, and it becomes even *less* profitable. The value of the team– which is the bulk of Spanos’ net worth– starts to tank. Billionaires know this already. The owners would LIKE the NFL to be profitable, but it. Just. Isn’t.

There are folks who make a ton off the NFL, and the NFL organization itself (not the teams) is enormously profitable. Goodell makes more than any individual owner does.

So yeah, I have sympathy with the Chargers ownership. They are scraping, because I don’t think Spanos has the actual cash-on-hand to spend as freely as most teams do, and pushing costs on unproven variables is one of the few ways they can do that with the Salary Floor in place.

This whole thing is a huge mess for the NFL, not because it puts the Chargers in a bad light, but because the Chargers need to push this move opens up the potential for this kind of scrutiny. Because this kind of stinginess doesn’t make sense– and making it make sense opens things up to the kind of awakening that could shake the NFL’s spot as King of the Hill.

So yeah. I can find an angle to support the Chargers instead of Bosa. Because I don’t buy into the perception that Billionaires Should Never Be Sided With. I don’t believe that billionaires are automatically bad guys, or that the owners are just leeches who provide little-to-nothing to the game. And the math of the situation certainly doesn’t bare out that they are just greedy jerks trying to squeeze every dollar they can from the players. They want their club to be profitable. To the teams on the bottom of the fandom pyramid, they aren’t. They are liabilities.

And THAT is a story that the NFL wants to avoid being known far, far more than anything else.

Other than a few numbers from the Packers, this is all speculation on your part. And the Packers don’t do all they can to increase their profit (why haven’t they sold naming rights to their stadium?), and the actual “profit” number means little because there are many accounting tricks to manipulate these numbers.

It’s not necessary to spend $2bil on a stadium. The Patriots’ stadium cost $428 million in current dollars, with the state kicking in about $75 mil in infrastructure. The league has a stadium fund Spanos could tap for $200 million, he would only need to come up with $300 million or so on his own, which he could easily borrow using the team as collateral. And they would make a ton more money with a new stadium.

Even the sad-sack Raiders have said they could come up with $500 mil towards a new stadium.

So I am not buying your argument that the owners are poor. $220 million+ in revenue sharing, $75-100 million in ticket revenues, add in concessions, parking, naming rights, local media rights, etc, and if you can’t make a profit you are the world’s worst businessman.

Concessions are similarly a laughable joke in terms of team profits– the *total* of ticket sales and concessions and parking and naming rights are actually close to that low-end $75 you’re citing (an average of about $71M/year, actually). Major teams– Cowboys, Raiders, Giants, and the like make a ton more. San Diego makes a ton less from Concessions, Tickets, Parking, Naming Rights– closer to the tune of $60M, based on averages of concession sales/ticket sale, and San Diego’s ticket sales prices and number of ticket sales. Also consider that the Chargers– who make about $13M in concessions sales, only get about $44% of that, the rest going to the vending companies the Chargers sell the rights to sell concessions to. That drops us down to about $54~M locally.

The Chargers, then, are looking at close to $275M total revenue last year. That is their *gross* take. Almost half of that (about $143M) went to player salaries. Another 18%~ of that goes to player benefits that aren’t allocated in Salary Cap numbers or contracts– insurance and the like, for about $25M. There is also *some* expenditure for players who are part of the team during the off season but don’t make the final cut, though this can largely be reduced to a rounding error– maybe about $2M total for most teams.

The cost to operate the stadium for the year runs another $16-20M; I’d put it closer to the $16M for San Diego, both because it’s San Diego, and since it has low environmental damage implications (no freezing weather, few major weather events period), and relatively low usage (which reduces some degree of wear and tear).

Scouting runs about $2-3M/year for NFL teams. Let’s lowball it again, since the Chargers are supposedly cheap, and put it at $2M.

The cost of the training rooms, massage, and other therapies that the team’s cover? That pops up to more than $18M/year in even the meanest of venues.

Then there’s the costs of team doctors, lawyers, and supporting staff who never get credit– cooks/caterers, accountants, bookkeepers, secretaries. On the course of a year, you’re looking at another $20M for those.

Position coaches are pulling an average of $400k/year each. Add the 20% non-salary bump that’s pretty standard, and you’re at $8.64M.

Coordinators? $850k/year average for the three of them– another 3M.

McCoy’s about $4M/year, so $4.8M in expenses.

GM, President, VPs– another *average* $6M (and the Chargers have actually been about that mark), base salary, so about $7.2M in total expenses there.

There are interest payments pushed through for every team; the Packers are definitely a weird case, and I don’t want to speculate that their debt expenses mirror every team.

There are other operational costs outside of the stadiums themselves during games– the Chargers don’t cover a fair number of those for Qualcom, but they do still pay their headquarters costs, costs of renting/utilizing training facilities, and I am positive that there are other expenses I haven’t accounted for yet.

At *MOST*, through all of that, with what the Chargers are looking at right now, the team is making *MAYBE* $6M, and I lowballed almost every expense that I could for the cheap-Chargers using minimums when I had that information at all available.

$6. Million. Dollars. That’s the ownership’s highest reasonable profit off of owning the San Diego Chargers. He gets 97% of that (there’s a 3% interest outside of Spanos). There are 9 players on the Chargers who make that much or more, who who cost the Chargers that much or more after payroll taxes and the like. Almost 18% of the players for the Chargers are making more from the team than Spanos is.

I’m not saying the owners are poor. But you don’t get an NFL team to get rich. And we’re past the days of a new Irsay or the like getting a team on the relative cheap. For the relative value of a team, the ownership makes almost *nothing*– they would get better return for simple bank interest of 1%.

Spanos couldn’t make enough money on a new stadium to pay back the interest of borrowing against the team, period. If he’s going to full-fund it himself, it’s coming from his income from non-NFL sources. And don’t get me wrong– those aren’t completely insignificant; he’s still filthy rich. But the NFL is *NOT* making him rich, he is *NOT* making an unreasonable profit on his investment, and he is *NOT* in a position that “a few million here, a few million there” can’t make-or-break the profitability of a team.

As for the Raiders piling in $500M– I have no idea how. The family’s wealth is significantly under Spanos, and yet far more tied to the team. Unless they plan on selling minority shares of the team to raise the money. The family’s entire net worth *barely* comes up to that $500M mark. They may have found investors, they may have found partners– and that’s certainly within the realm of possibility for Spanos to do. But the Raiders are more marketable when they are good (not great, good), than the Chargers are when they are at their absolute best. I don’t know how much that plays into things, or how much Oakland businesses just desperately want to keep the Raiders in town for civic reasons, while San Diego is… well, the passionate fan base is passionate, but it’s not as definitive of the city as the Raiders are to Oakland. I’d have to do more research to find those numbers, and how they got them, but I frankly don’t care to at this point.

NFL owners, while most are extremely wealthy from pursuits outside the NFL, are not getting wealthy because of it. Their lost opportunity cost is *enormous* for the value of the team. The only way an NFL owner gets noticeably richer because of the NFL, is if they sell their team. And even at the Packers end, $29M profit on a $375M net income is a 7.3% ROI– and that’s *before* that $29 gets put back into the stadium for upgrades and repairs (which are currently estimated at $55M over the next two years).

It is an enormous money pit. It is about one thing: the prestige. You either inherit a team, or you are wealthy from other investments or businesses, but you simply, purely, completely, cannot make a significant profit in the NFL if you’re a smaller market team, and even the most profitable teams (Cowboys, Redskins) are making garbage compared to a similar net-worth investment into the NASDAQ. And there is, actually, a far greater degree of risk in ownership than they get credit for– ask baseball circa 1990. Being king of the hill in sports isn’t a guarantee, and if the NFL slips even just a little bit from that perch, the value of teams vanishes in a heartbeat, the revenue of teams drops significantly, and whatever slim profits there were are gone over night.

You can talk accounting tricks all you want, but we can look at the Packers expenses, we know Salary caps, and finding the costs of doctors, stadium costs, reported licenses from vendors and the like is findable, if you’re willing to do some legwork and research– I did a lot of that in college, when I looked at how NFL teams impacted city planning and the costs of operating stadia in cities that shared/covered such expenses. It’s all there, and more readily available now. We can get *specific* numbers from the Packers, and we can find the Packers ranking in terms of ticket sales, prices, concessions, parking, merchandise sales, and extrapolate very readily from there on almost all of it, once adjusting for local area cost differences– utility information is available, retail beer prices are available, hot dog prices, you name it.

You severely overestimate the income, and severely underestimate the cost of running an NFL team.

Averien, very well said. As one of the charger supporters (although for the reasons Dave was paroding) in the bosa dispute, this was nice to read. Also, you easily broke my (i was also Dan Marino super bowl ring) record for longest comment/not dave post on this website

Net profit jumped to $49 mil from $29 mil the previous year. A big source of the increase was a payoff stadium improvements (on-site pro shop, the Hall of Fame, and a restaurant). That’s a 12% profit margin, which is pretty healthy for any business. This number will increase as other stadium improvements and development around the stadium come on line.

So that’s a much rosier picture than a year ago.

How did Kraft get his stadium built? At the time (2001) NFL revenues were less than half of what they are now, and he paid a lot more for his team than Spanos did. I don’t think he hit billionaire status until after the new stadium opened and they started developing the land around the stadium.

A new stadium opens up a ton of new revenue possibilities. It doesn’t require holding a gun to the head of the local community.

This is a well thought out and great comment and I’m well aware it costs a lot more than expected to run an NFL team. But it’s still the Packers you are using as an example, which brings it’s own problems because they are a unique case. We cannot fully judge how the rest of the league operates based on the Packers, they just give a rough idea.

Dean Spanos might not be as rich as he seems, but there’s no way someone who gets 226 Million just from league revenue sharing can’t afford to throw a tiny fraction of that to their highly touted #3 overall pick. Unless he’s a really shit owner and businessman, in which case he doesn’t belong owning a team.

First, you can’t base your estimate of NFL profits on the one team in the league that isn’t allowed to make a profit. The Packers, as a municipal corporation, are a nonprofit by law.

Second, the single largest expense, personnel, is covered by the league’s revenue sharing system. As Dave pointed out, the revenue share among the teams after the league’s operating expenses last season was $226M. The Chargers had roughly $125M in active money on the cap (dead money is paid in previous years and so doesn’t factor into cash flow), as well as approximately $18M in player reserves off the cap. Add in $1,173,000 for practice squad players, $2M for Mike McCoy, $2.5M for the rest of the coaching staff, and $3.5M for the front office staff not named Dean Spanos, and their total personnel expenses were Just over $150M last year.

That means the Chargers, before any other revenue or overhead, make over $75M a season. This is a team that does not pay for stadium maintenance or upkeep, and only pays $3M a year on its stadium lease, a number that nets them about $500,000 a year due to money the city pays from an ADA settlement. It’s almost impossible not to make money in the NFL, unless, like the Packers, you’re not allowed to.

I think the emphasis is on the wrong thing in this issue. Wanting a deferred bonus is a reasonable interest for the team since they’re trying to to their best to manage Bosa’s cap impact year-to-year, just like all 32 teams do with all 53 players every season. Wanting offset language is fine too, because it would be like paying for a $10 lasagna at a restaurant but you only finish $3 worth of it before you say you don’t want the rest, then someone else comes in and buys your $7 worth of leftovers for $5 without the restaurant refunding you anything. Maybe that’s a super weird or badly explained example, but not having offset language means you’re still paying for something you’re not using but someone else was willing to buy off you instead.

So it’s not WHAT the Chargers are asking that’s the problem, they’re reasonable concerns. The PROBLEM is that they were demanding that Bosa agree to not get the terms that every other guy in his shoes gets every year. Sure, it would help the team out if they had gotten their way, but that’s not the market standard and they’re being unreasonable to expect that they should get special treatment. The actual terms aren’t what people should be concerned about, it’s that the Chargers weren’t willing to give him what everyone else gets and then stubbornly forcing this to be an issue all the way through most of preseason while trying (and failing) to use the media to pressure him into taking a deal that was less favorable than he deserves for a player in his position.

All signing bonuses are amortized over the first five years of the contract, or the term of the contract, whichever is lower. Any performance or weekly bonuses are paid as a single sum and count on the cap for the league year in which they are paid. Ancillary bonuses, such as annual roster bonuses may count against that year’s cap or be amortized in the same way as signing bonuses, beginning in the year they are paid.